Question about Automotive Parts store inventory

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Anyone knows what happens to the slow moving parts?

Do they just sit on the shelf, then what do they do with it?

Is it possible that I can get a water pump from AutoZone that is very old, rusty new stock?
 
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Are new/rebuilt first quality ones that expensive?
 
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When I worked at AZ, we were constantly flexing new p/n's in and sending stuff back to the DC. I gurantee they dont waste shelf space on product that doesn't move. It also depends on the store and the local neighborhood. AZ is extremley micromanaged. The big Hub stores are more likely to have new old stock. If you're concerned, you can have the employee scan the SKU and they can tell you the last time that item was sold and and received. And of course, you should always take the new part out of the box and examine it before purchase. If you dont like what they have, 9/10 times they can order another one same day and or tell you which closest stores have it. Ive never saw any rusty parts. If we had something like that, it was almost always "damaged out" by the manager.
 
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Originally Posted By: Vern_in_IL
Is it possible that I can get a water pump from AutoZone that is very old, rusty new stock?


I've purchased 50+ year old NOS parts that were as pristine as new. In a relatively temperature controlled environment, boxed and not in actual use, parts will last a very long time with no deterioration. So you don't have to fret over a water pump that may be a couple years old.
 
Parts are shipped in cosmolene preservative and plastic bags-in-boxes where appropriate.

Stuff like brake rotors and calipers that rust in mere weeks on my car look pristine from the store.

Online shopping with Advance lets me see if there's a part at store B when I usually use A. They don't seem to have a reliable hub, though.

NAPA on the other hand has a rockin' hub that's open late, centrally located in the industrial district. They sometimes have to "order it" from the warehouse (in paperwork), but then they just walk across an imaginary line and retrieve it.
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We have a decent amount of idle inventory, way less than the average though. Technically for a dealer parts department, any part with 12 months of no movement is considered idle inventory. We have our system setup to start counting it at 9 months. At that point we start showing them at cost minus on the dealer parts locator. Idle inventory is very bad as not only is it the owner's money being wasted, but it takes the spot of something that actually sells. Also if your idle inventory exceeds a certain percentage, you are disqualified from certain programs from the manufacturer.

So when people ask why we don't have some random part in stock, I tell them "if we sell it enough times we will stock it, but if we haven't sold it in 4 years I am not giving it shelf space." Plus with so many parts that we can get either same day, overnight, or at the worst 2-3 days out it makes no sense to stock some of them.
 
If you're a hardware store or an auto parts store and you want to impress me, you'll have something sitting on the shelf that's been there for 20 years. You'll have a product that's such super high quality, the manufacturer went out of business 20 years ago. And if you REALLY want to impress me, you'll sell it to me for the original price.
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Here they keep the popular stuff in the stores.they keep slow movers in a where house about 70 miles away and they make 2-3 trips a day to get stuff and bring it here. All the stores do this.
 
Originally Posted By: Merkava_4
If you're a hardware store or an auto parts store and you want to impress me, you'll have something sitting on the shelf that's been there for 20 years. You'll have a product that's such super high quality, the manufacturer went out of business 20 years ago. And if you REALLY want to impress me, you'll sell it to me for the original price.
grin2.gif

That's like the place where a good number of my tools came from-there used to be an Ace Hardware on Hamilton Ave. in Cincinnati (Northside)-guy sold Vaco screwdrivers & nutdrivers, price was always marked on the handles-if you didn't like the price, just keep digging deeper!
 
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Originally Posted By: Merkava_4
If you're a hardware store or an auto parts store and you want to impress me, you'll have something sitting on the shelf that's been there for 20 years. You'll have a product that's such super high quality, the manufacturer went out of business 20 years ago. And if you REALLY want to impress me, you'll sell it to me for the original price.
grin2.gif



We used to have a hardware store like that, 80yr old guy owned it and he had inventory going back to the beginning. Very crowded shelves and narrow isles but if you went back to the counter and needed something that hadn't been made in 30 or 40 years he would disappear into the back for 10-20 minutes and come out with exactly what you were looking for and proceed to charge you exactly what the price was originally marked. If that was too much money he'd haggle with ya. Grandpa used to take me down there when I was little, miss those little neighborhood hardware stores.
 
Originally Posted By: ironman_gq
Originally Posted By: Merkava_4
If you're a hardware store or an auto parts store and you want to impress me, you'll have something sitting on the shelf that's been there for 20 years. You'll have a product that's such super high quality, the manufacturer went out of business 20 years ago. And if you REALLY want to impress me, you'll sell it to me for the original price.
grin2.gif



We used to have a hardware store like that, 80yr old guy owned it and he had inventory going back to the beginning. Very crowded shelves and narrow isles but if you went back to the counter and needed something that hadn't been made in 30 or 40 years he would disappear into the back for 10-20 minutes and come out with exactly what you were looking for and proceed to charge you exactly what the price was originally marked. If that was too much money he'd haggle with ya. Grandpa used to take me down there when I was little, miss those little neighborhood hardware stores.


It shouldn't be surprising that most places operating like that have gone out of business.
 
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